Google Mars (2005) | Hacker News Reader

Google Mars (2005)

google.com

195 pointsbelter80 comments

Hahaha, that was a busy weekend when this launched in like 2005-2006. I was one of the sysadmins of the website with the THEMIS images. Google promoted it directly below the search box. Which made my web servers 3 clicks away from Google’s front page. I spent the weekend cannibalizing compute nodes from one of our clusters to work as caching proxies. It all worked out pretty well.

Very cool, thanks for sharing. It's fascinating to me that google has put so little effort into their planetary maps since an inital burst of interest, but hasn't killed them yet. Is it just "below the radar"? I guess I assumed they would have some management process that kills zombie projects... don't they?

From my experience working there, killing a cute toy project like this takes some breaking change in a dependency plus nobody willing to spend a few hours every now and then to maintain it. Both of these are basically luck of the draw, so it’s not surprising to have stuff like this stick around for this long.

Since this is built on top of google maps, I suspect the only marginal cost of keeping it is keeping the 10s of MB of (MAYBE 100s MB) of data around. The cost of the labor to delete it is probably more than another 100 years of serving it.

There’s no real money in the planetary data. All of my colleagues who worked on that have gone on to Google and to work on Google Maps or Google Earth Engine, which do generate revenue. This project ended up ultimately being a recruitment effort on Google’s part.

Noel and Michael launched mars and moon in about three weeks after starting as 'interns' under me, as that was the fastest path to a badge. They're both still at Google, I think. (As employees!)

Someday I'll write up the story, but that was a heck of a fun project!

Wow, things... have changed.

Thanks for sharing.

> (As employees!)

Cracked me up

Lol, Noel as an intern.

Here's another 3D Mars surface explorer: https://murray-lab.caltech.edu/CTX/V01/SceneView/MurrayLabCT...

Edit: Searching through my notes, I realised I've been down this rabbit hole before. Here are some more of the same:

https://explore-mars.esri.com/

http://www.mars3dmap.com

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/24881/planet-mars-3d-model/

don't forget Eyes on the Solar System, WorldWind, Cosmographia, JMars, and USGS PILOT

I've always been really disapointed that google let their planetary maps stagnate.

I work (~5% of my work week) on https://trek.nasa.gov/ . Our front page sucks, but the individual map browsers are quite rich in terms of available layers and tools. Our UI is... not optimized for discoverability, but there's a lot there. Mars is at https://trek.nasa.gov/mars/

Was about to post a link to the same, can confirm, perhaps not as slick as googles offering but a much better map, it actually has a scale bar and tools to help you measure things.

If Google still had a sense of humor they would do Google Flat Earth for April Fool’s Day one of these years. Complete with perimeter ice wall and an announcement that scientists have made an amazing discovery about the true shape of the Earth. Easter egg of infinite turtle stack supporting the Earth Plane if you do 3D view and flip it over. Alas…

It's been out for over 15 years now, you'd hope they'd add some street view...

The problem is the only car that could drive around Mars to take street pictures is in a heliocentric orbit instead. There was some sort of requirements mixup.

https://www.google.com/sky/

https://www.google.com/moon/

Woah, check out this page: https://www.google.com/sky/about.html

2011 in the footer. Remnants of the old google of a by-gone era. Simultaneously feels both like yesterday and an eternity ago.

The video is from 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX9MeF2Au9c

I bet whoever made this is no longer there and it has been forgotten about internally.

The comments from 15 years ago are even more interesting.

What's that quote about dying a hero vs living long enough to see yourself become the villain?

The prophecy.

Isn’t that Google in a nutshell?

Sometimes you chicken out, and someone else does it ...

To wit: around the same time, Google tossed out some service that would listen to your computer's mic for room sounds (such as a TV broadcast), and provide helpful info.

I guess people were creeped out, thing was shut down, and now we have Amazon's version ...

Only the young die good.

There was a time where employees could get paths under google.com/ for semi-personal projects.

It would be cool if they updated Google Sky to use JWST images.

Mars is also built in to Google Maps now: https://www.google.com/maps/space/mars/

For some reasons steet view is not working! Hope they fix it soon!

Privacy rules, they have the same in Germany.

Just wanted to point out that legally nothing is stopping Google from releasing Street View in Germany as far as I know. Maybe they will do so soon, considering that Apple Look Around is available for most of Germany

Street View is also available in Germany as far as I can tell.

Only in the initial cities in which they started doing it before the backlash got so large that they abandoned it.

A few months later, when Microsoft or whoever did their take on it, nobody cared anymore because it wasn't about principles.

It was more of a media campaign, ad brokers trying to kneecap that other ad broker. Microsoft wasn't in the ad business back in the day, so no threat to media businesses.

Street view for Google Mars. I think the atmosphere is too thin for those photo-taking cars to run very far. That and the lack of any streets on Mars.

At least in the unclassified imagery that has been made public... (cue eerie music)

https://support.google.com/maps/thread/165997335/when-will-g...

If you want higher res, check out the recently released Murray Lab CTX global mosaic:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/new-interactive-mosaic-uses...

https://murray-lab.caltech.edu/CTX/index.html

Any idea of high res images from Tianwen-1, as per reports they have imaged most of Mars surface, and being a more recent mission, may have better camera.

Found a chinese map here: https://moon.bao.ac.cn/Mars/index/index.html

From the looks of it, it might be Tianwen-1 MoRIC (100m/px) data. But I'm not sure, I always have difficulty navigating non-NASA data sources.

I don't think the higher resolution HiRIC (up to 2.5m/px) data is publicly available. I don't also know what sort of coverage they have for it.

But in general it's not just having the data, stitching a global mosaic is a non-trivial effort. Afaik the Murray Lab mosaic took several years of work to make.

There is also HRSC from ESA that has been imaging Mars with fairly good resolution/coverage.

And finally also UAE Hope mission has produced global map, but I haven't been able to find their full-resolution data. https://nyuad.nyu.edu/en/news/latest-news/science-and-techno...

Yay, great! Here's the raw mosaic, make your browser full-screen for this:

https://murray-lab.caltech.edu/CTX/V01/SceneView/MurrayLabCT...

Check this newer version: https://www.google.com/maps/space/mars/@17.5325978,179.82741...

They also have many other planets and celestial bodies here.

I didn’t know Mars had the same streets state of my hometown

I thought I was about to read that it had been discontinued. Glad to see it hasn’t!

You have 30 days to pack your things and move to another planet. You remaining Google Mars subscription will be refunded to your account.

Always love playing with this especially after reading Red Mars and recognizing a lot of place names.

But also sad google hasn’t even kept the styling updated to their branding or added any features.

I love the fact that they haven't updated styling: this one is clear and fast.

Except it keeps focusing on the input screen and opens my keyboard all the time.

I don't think that's a good point to critizice Google for. Unlike many other websites, the Google homepage has always remained clear and fast, even after multiple redesigns.

They should partner up with NASA and add "Street view".

My summer house on Mars is private, I don't want a Street View image of it.

And to this comment future generations will trace the origin of the Tempodox Effect, as the Martian analog of Barbra's.

Search located Pathfinder without problems[0]. But not the Ares III landing site[1]...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Pathfinder [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(film)

Having recently finished the book (awesome btw), Acidalia Planitia, Pathfinder and Schiaparelli where my first 3 queries

The site was launched about 5 years before the book was written.

It's been kept fairly up to date

I had never really paid attention to the fact that all the craters are round. If anyone else is just noticing that, this explains it: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-impact-cr...

Someone once told me that Mars has better elevation data than Earth. Maybe it's the quality of the orbiters or maybe it's the fact that there is less atmospheric interference and you can use LiDAR vs radar? Can anyone confirm?

bdon, if you're reading this we need a protomaps archive for the moon and Mars :)

I thought that earth elevation data is unreliable in forested areas, as vegetation hides the true elevation of those areas. That's probably not a significant problem on Mars...

I think vegetation is an issue with LiDAR but my understanding is that radar penetrates down to the ground.

My guess would be that they meant the oceans. No water = better elevation data.

Wow, this old site is exceptionally fast!

Google data scraping is not that good. Olympus Mons is not listed in mountains as other volcanoes.

   Feature: Olympus Mons
   Type: Mons, montes

Seems weird that the "Mountains" link doesn't label Olympus Mons. It's the tallest mountain in the solar system.

I don't understand how Google could have this and yet they don't have high res images of the Earth's oceans.

The data doesn't exist. You can't map oceans from space like you can land.

No directions?

If the visible map here is gray, why is it red-ish in the sky looking at it with the naked eye?

https://wehoville.com/2013/01/07/why-are-images-from-space-p...

That article feels overly dismissive. Notably more recent Mars missions such as Tianwen and Hope do have normal bayer cameras onboard producing color images.

Wonder why they haven't killed this yet. I guess hardly anyone knows this exists

How do they pick a 0 elevation?

Good question! it's the average. https://mars.nasa.gov/mgs/faqs/faq_sci.html

Check out the scale, those are very tall peaks in the centre at 21km!

weird that there's no map scale provided - like a "___ = 1km" legend thingy

also the silver/gold infrared map reminds me of Brinstar in the original Metroid.

What, no Street View? Why?

No walking directions?

Always wanted this

I want to select A on Earth and B on Mars, then click "Directions".

street view?

I miss the days when I'd see a HN post to a Google project and be excited to check it out.

I don't necessarily fault Google--they have to do what makes sense for their business. But I wish, at the very least from a PR perspective, more companies would create cool things without worrying about whether they can be monetized.

I do miss it too. What is the point in having so much money if you can't do exciting, useful, and cool stuff.

The basic equation:

- Small, nimble, fun, fast, low amount of cash, interesting work, ease to deploy

- Big, fat, tedious, slow, extensive supply of cash, maybe some interesting work at most, pain to get anything deployed

Reply on news.ycombinator.com